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1. THE PLAGIARIST Careless of his debts, he never credits submissions to the magazine he edits. 2. THE TAXIDERMIST Her father's dead at last, the lout— but now he's all she writes about. 3. THE ASSASSIN His verse means less to the world of letters than the bad reviews he gives his betters.

I called up tech and got the voicemail code. It’s taken me this long to find my feet. Since last we spoke that evening it has snowed. Fifty-four new messages. Most are old and blinking into a future months complete. I contacted tech to get my voicemail code to hear your voice, not some bozo on the road the week of Thanksgiving dubbing me his sweet and breaking up and bleating how it snowed the Nashville side of Chattanooga and slowed the beltway to a standstill. The radio said sleet. The kid in tech sent on my voicemail code. I blew a night on lightening the system’s load, woke to white enveloping the trees, the street that’s blanked out by my leaving. It had snowed. Lately others’ pasts will turn me cold. I heard out every message, pressed delete. I’d happily forget my voice, the mail, its code. We spoke at last that evening. Then it snowed.

A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk, and like midwives and undertakers possess a weird authority. Crickets leap from the stubble, parting before me like the Red Sea. The garden sprawls and spoils. Across the lake the campers have learned to water ski. They have, or they haven’t. Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!” Cloud shadows rush over drying hay, fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine. The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod brighten the margins of the woods. Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; water, silver-still, and a vee of geese. * The cicada’s dry monotony breaks over me. The days are bright and free, bright and free. Then why did I cry today for an hour, with my whole body, the way babies cry? * A white, indifferent morning sky, and a crow, hectoring from its nest high in the hemlock, a nest as big as a laundry basket ... In my childhood I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet, waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away. The damp dirt road gave off this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps. Spruce, inadequate, and alien I stood at the side of the road. It was the only life I had.

Song 1 Julito used to shine the soul of his shoes before he left for the Palladium to take the wax off the floor while Tito Rodriguez flew around the walls like a parakeet choking maracas It was around this time that Julito threw away his cape because the Umbrella Man and the Dragons put the heat on all the Ricans who used to fly around in Dracula capes swinging canes or carrying umbrellas Even if there was no rain on the horizon That same epoca my mother got the urge to paint the living room pink and buy a new mirror with flamingoes elegantly on the right hand corner because the one we had was broken from the time that Carlos tried to put some respect Into Julito and knock the party out of him. Song 2 All the old Chevies that the gringoes from upstate New York wore out Were sailing around the neighborhood with dices and San Martin de Porres el negrito who turned catholic Hanging in the front windows. Song 3 There was still no central heating in the tenements We thought that the cold was the oldest thing on the planet earth We used to think about my Uncle Listo Who never left his hometown We’d picture him siting around cooling himself with a fan In that imaginary place called Puerto Rico.

Three teenage girls in tight red sleeveless blouses and black Capri pants And colorful headscarves secured in a knot to their chins Are walking down the hill, chatting, laughing, Cupping their cigarettes against the light rain, The closest to the road with her left thumb stuck out Not looking at the cars going past. Every Friday night to the dance, and wet or dry They get where they’re going, walk two miles or get a ride, And now the two-door 1950 Dodge, dark green Darkening as evening falls, stops, they nudge Each other, peer in, shrug, two scramble into the back seat, And the third, the boldest, famous For twice running away from home, slides in front with the man Who reaches across her body and pulls the door shut.

I. The earth and its foregoing, this could be horizon. Combined, the radicals pressed into one another. What do we represent lying held in men and arms, to erect gold and sun and legs (running)? I call you disc, sun entangled in the branches of a tree. Rice field over struggle, earth over self. Effacement. Your mouth is a carriage and the carriage plus the tenth of a cubit is turn, bent knuckle revolving around a pivot. Common, is the object beneath the bench. Plant, covers, knife, a weed extended to mean govern, the flame in the middle of the lamp is the man with ample arms, blend and pace in the midst of court. Your torso sings Garden.                       Composes. II. Mastery of weeds extends to mean: plants bending to cover the middle of lamp. A knife for a flame, foregoing the earth, this is the horizon of a man with arms. To move across your body, I am the carriage and the cubit, the disc running tangled in the branches of a tree. I am the common object beneath the bench, the wheel running length of the rutted road down to the garden of abdomen. I struggle over fields to kiss a mouth filled with rice, to put away evil.           This is earth over self. III. Beneath a table of common struggles I blend and pace in ample arms. A rice field foregoing garden on the horizon of your belly. Govern the revolving cubit, the bent knuckle. Me over you, over self, a tree. Earth entangled in the branches of a knife. Plant and cover inside your mouth, the turning disc, the carriage and wheel. To erect lamps in the bend of your gold leg running is to extend the word to mean master, garden or weed.

Mary Magdalene Virgin Mother Mary, Sister of Martha

God-My-Father gave me three words: O-My-Love. O-My-God. Holy-Holy-Holy.

Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own. "Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The Girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain. "She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. "The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form By silent sympathy. "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. "And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live Here in this happy dell." Thus Nature spake—The work was done— How soon my Lucy's race was run! She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be.

I emerge from the mind’s cave into the worse darkness outside, where things pass and the Lord is in none of them. I have heard the still, small voice and it was that of the bacteria demolishing my cosmos. I have lingered too long on this threshold, but where can I go? To look back is to lose the soul I was leading upwards towards the light. To look forward? Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?